If i have to use Windows, i install Geany - which is what i use on Linux in gui mode anyway. I only install Cygwin if i need more than just an editor.

Yeah, i do that quite a lot. Not echo usually, just cat. And not usually to add things (it's too easy to miss out an angle bracket and overwrite what's already there), but frequently to insert text in a new file.

Octal? Surely you mean binary. Or did it have 8-way switches? The machines i used to patch via the front panel toggle switches had 16 bit words, so we thought in hex.

True. Earth was populated for millions of years by organisms that polluted the atmosphere with oxygen.

Who do you think will eat the cost of rising sea levels and dried up water supplies? It certainly won't be the companies that caused the problems in the first place. It will be us again. But those costs will be astronomically higher than a tiny little carbon tax.

I'm not sure who the "we" is that you're referring to, but you sound like you know what you're talking about. How do you recommend governments act to reduce carbon emissions?

Unfortunately, the Australian federal government is a 100% owned subsidiary of the mining companies. Although the prime minister is a moron in his own right, he's only doing what his bosses tell him to do.

Only if you don't understand science. If you do understand science, you know it's not debatable – but it is falsifiable (i.e., it can be proved wrong, if it is wrong, by reproducible experiment).

You can debate things you don't understand, of course, if you must – and a lot of people do – but it's entirely meaningless.

Here's one: Plastic plankton.

Nah, dispersants don't dissolve plastic - otherwise your dishwashing detergent would dissolve the plastic bottle it comes in.

A vast amount of this plastic is breaking up into tiny pieces, which then form a new class of plankton plastic plankton - and this plastic plankton is being eating by sea creatures along with the phytoplankton and zooplankton which make up their normal diet. Nobody knows what the effects of this will be.

Water is not the "ultimate" solvent. There are plenty of substances that do not dissolve in water - and plastic's one of them. What's happening is that sunlight and possibly wave action is breaking the plastic into microscopic particles, which are then being ingested by marine animals, just as larger pieces of plastic are. Nobody knows what effect this will have on the organisms themselves - or the organisms that prey on those organisms (which includes humans).

I'll never be able to afford to retire, but if i do i'll be riding buses for entertainment and movement, too!

Building radio stations in Afghanistan was pretty challenging!

I started with VI 20 years ago and i still use it - but only when i'm working in a text terminal and need to do small edits. For almost everything else, i use Geany, which i find the most useful and streamlined editor of all that i've tried. But for the small amount of Android app programming i've done, i used Eclipse, because it makes life so much easier. There's no excuse for sticking with old software just because you're used to it.